Boise State University Leadership: Anti-Gun, Anti-Military, Or Just Prudent?

Today's Idaho Statesman has an article that's generating a lot of attention here in SW Idaho on the refusal of the BSU leadership to allow a 21 gun salute on campus this coming Veterans Day. Excerpt:

Boise State University has turned down a request from veterans for a 21-gun salute on campus Monday to mark Veterans Day, saying it might scare bystanders still spooked by school shootings in other states.
R.K. Williams, a Vietnam War veteran and longtime Boise State employee who runs the campus veterans services office, said he asked university officials for permission to hold the salute at noon, but they turned him down — twice. The salute would consist of seven shooters firing blanks in three volleys as part of a flag ceremony in the Quad at the center of campus...
...But "having a 21-gun salute in today's environment in the middle of classes didn't seem to be an appropriate way to celebrate" Veterans Day, BSU spokesman Frank Zang said. He cited a student shooting rampage at Virginia Tech University last April that killed 33, including the gunman, and said students and staff might not realize gunshots are part of a ceremony and are safe.
"Gunfire on campus in the middle of the day would not be prudent or appropriate for safety and security," Zang said.

Adam, probably correctly, opines that this decision demonstrates reflexive anti-gun attitudes on the part of the university leadership. ("Anti-gun" is an even bigger loser of a political position here in Idaho than in most places.) There's little doubt that BSU leaders as a whole are more liberal than the state in general, but I'm wondering if this might be something even more ominous than "guns are bad".

Progressives like to claim that they "support the troops", but are frequently quick to believe any story about atrocities blamed on the U.S. military, or support any measure that comes out that would weaken our military. They always have a good excuse, but the net result of their actions are always opposition to the military as a whole. (It's like liberals in the '70s, where they claimed to oppose the Soviet Union, but everything they supported tended to make the U.S. weaker.) I certainly hope that this isn't a case of BSU leadership demonstrating a general anti-military mindset, but this possibility can't be dismissed out of hand.

On the other hand, the leadership might be, as they're claiming, just prudent; they really might not have the ability to contact students ahead of time to let them know that there'll be a gun salute in 5 days. If so, I'd encourage them to resign and let the state hire people who are more competent and actually can institute a notification system.

Update 2336 08 Nov: The BSU powers-that-be came to their senses even quicker than I thought they would; I figured it'd be until tomorrow that they caved.

USS Montpelier Deploys

The Navy website has a good picture of USS Montpelier (SSN 765) pulling out of Norfolk to deploy with the Harry S Truman Strike Group yesterday:

Submariners looking at the picture will see that the boat is being pushed to port by the tug tied up at the bow; those not as familiar with how a submarine leaves the pier might just focus on the personnel on the bridge, and wonder, "Is anyone driving that thing?":

Assuming all goes well, Montpelier and her crew should next be in the news whenever they're about to relieve the Enterprise Strike Group in the Middle East sometime next month, and we'll get the standard "we're about to attack Iran" stories that accompany any carrier relief in the Fifth Fleet.

Navy Settles An Old Score

Navy's 3OT win over Notre Dame yesterday ended a 43 game losing streak to the Fighting Irish -- the longest losing streak of one team to another in NCAA history. The avenging of this streak (which I sure has left ND-fan WillyShake quite shaken) means that the U.S. Navy has now atoned for every embarrassement with the exception of the HMS Leopard / USS Chesapeake encounter of 1807.

Of interest, the 2nd longest win streak by one team over another was Nebraska's 36 consecutive wins over my alma mater Kansas through 2004; Kansas got their 2nd win in three years over Nebraska yesterday in a really humiliating fashion. The 76 points given up by Nebraska were the most ever surrendered by a 'Husker team, proving that defensive coordinator Kevin "Idiot" Cosgrove should really consider studying the Japanese samurai culture and the Bushido code for what to do in the face of intolerable failure. Luckily, he and the other coaches brought in by the previous Athletic Director, Satan, will be gone in a few weeks; 'Husker fans are apparently buying as many tickets to the Colorado game as they can to give them a fitting farewell -- and ensure they don't come back to Nebraska when they're fired by Saint Tom after the final gun. Here's a picture of one of the coveted tickets to that game:

Oh, well, it's almost basketball season...

USS Hampton: "The Easy Button"

VADM John Donnelly, who as COMNAVSUBFOR has administrative responsibility for all submarines, made some comments regarding the recent problems aboard USS Hampton (SSN 767) that made me think the Submarine Force is taking the right approach to this. Excerpts:

Vice Adm. John J. Donnelly said Thursday that he is trying to determine whether the alleged misconduct on the USS Hampton is an isolated incident.
“I do not have any indications now of a forcewide problem, certainly not of the magnitude that we have there,” said Donnelly, commander of the Submarine Force. “But I am asking those questions, and we're looking very hard at this.” ...
...“We have a group of individuals, not a single individual, but a group who were working together, and they compromised their integrity,” Donnelly said. “I think they were pushing the easy button, perhaps to avoid the pain of long hours and hard work.”
A chief petty officer in the squadron's staff noticed irregularities in the records during a routine engineering check, Donnelly said...
...“We're looking very, very carefully at the root causes of what happened on the Hampton, and the investigation is still ongoing, so it's a little early for me to draw conclusions there,” Donnelly said. “I expect we'll wrap it up in the very near future.”

The easiest thing for the Sub Force to do in this case is decide that the problem was completely confined to the Hampton and not look into real root causes. And by "root causes", I don't mean limiting it to integrity; I mean looking deeper and asking the hard questions like, "Why would an entire division decide to avoid the 'long hours and hard work' on this particular requirement?" They should maybe look into whether whatever checks were skipped can perhaps be done in a less time-consuming way, or checked less often, or if maybe there's a smarter way to put together a system of having supervisors periodically monitor these checks than what we're doing now -- something that lends itself to being less paperwork-intensive and more deckplate-focused. Of course, doing that would involve making Naval Reactors admit they have not been doing it the best way up until now, and that's a longshot. Still, I can always hope...

Update 0951 03 Nov: More on VADM Donnelly's remarks at the Navy Times.

Royal Navy Submarine Recruiting Ad

Check out this submarine recruiting advertisement from the Royal Navy:



To me, this seems just as effective as what we've been doing -- and much more effective than the old "E-3 pulls his fancy car right up to the pier gate" ads we were doing a few years ago.